| | APRIL 201919CIOReviewCITRIX JUST WORKS FOR THECITY OF SPRINGFIELDBy Jeff Coiner, Director of Information Systems, City of SpringfieldWith a population of more than 166,000 people, the City of Springfield, Missouri is the third largest city in the state. Like most IT departments for local government organizations of our size, we are responsible for supporting the technology requirements for all the City's operations. From our Springfield-Branson National Airport to the Dickerson Park Zoo, we literally have operations from A to Z. Such diverse technology needs that include VOIP phones, point-of-sale terminals, Police & Fire records management systems, 911 Computer-Aided Dispatch, electronic plan review, online payments, and both legacy and cloud-based applications, challenge our ability to maintain standards and security that work for all systems. Virtualization is CriticalOver the last several years, we have invested in virtualization technologies in our data centers. That investment has paid real dividends in allowing us to provide the back-end infrastructure quickly in a cost-effective and efficient way. Many of the projects we have undertaken during that period might not have been possible with additional expense of physical hardware and software licenses. We had also considered application and desktop virtualization for some time as well, to better manage and support our client software. About two years ago, we decided to embark on a trial of the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop software with some specific goals of providing better remote capabilities for our IT staff and one or two other departments. The success of that trial made it apparent that wanted to do more. So, we made it a budget priority to build out the infrastructure that would enable us to provide secure, mobile access to more of our applications. Citrix XenApp has enabled us to deliver the applications that are hosted on our internal network in a secure manner to any location and any device. Our employees can utilize Microsoft Office products, ESRI's ArcMap, Laserfiche, MiCollab and many of our legacy, in-house applications from any location with an Internet connection. XenApp has also allowed us to keep up with security patches and software updates more frequently than we could prior to using it. XenApp Simplifies Software Deployment One of our recent success stories with Citrix XenApp, was an upgrade to the ESRI ArcMap product. We have well over 100 users of ArcMap across the enterprise. It is a critical tool for many of our employees that deal with the City's street and sewer infrastructure as well as those involved in construction and business development. Our Geographical Information Systems (GIS) staff along with our IT Help Desk and Network Team were all involved in the software upgrade process. We used Jeff Coiner
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